Welcome to the Wednesday Walk Around the Web, where we weave & wind through weblinks weekly. Hopefully you will find the links on offer amusing, interesting, or, occasionally, profound. Views expressed in the Wednesday Walk do not necessarily reflect those of anyone but the writer. Do you have a link you want to see featured in next week’s Walk? Comment on the Walk post at the Place to Be Nation Facebook page, or find Glenn on the social media platform of your choice!
- This Week in Crowdfunding Initiatives: The US Holocaust Museum is raising funds to preserve, translate, and publish diaries written by Holocaust victims & survivors. It’s vital to preserve first-hand accounts, even moreso now that the generation of survivors who were younger in the 30s and 40s is dying.
- Often “survival of the fittest” doesn’t produce big muscled predators or tiny quick animals; often it produces things like the Mola mola, a 2200-pound rice cracker wrapped in leather.
- It’s been a year since the Pulse massacre. I recently saw this article about a father who never took his son’s body to be buried, after learning that he was gay. I know there are a lot of vile, hateful people, who won’t confront the fact that they create hostile environments that force their children to hide important parts of themselves, but that…is downright inhuman.
- RIP Nabra Hassanen.
- RIP Steven Furst.
- The idea that latex gloves might not protect paramedics and others from exposure to dangerous substances is…frightening.
- I’ve always thought that more dinosaurs should be made out of flowers.
- The US Supreme Court unanimously ruled this week that the government can’t refuse to register a trademark because it’s offensive. There goes legal recourse against the Washington Racists, I guess.
- So Steve Scalise, noted racist and homophobe, got shot last week along with three other people at Congressional Republican baseball practice. For all that I talk about the guillotine lifestyle and “thou shalt not suffer a millionaire to live” and such, that kind of has to come out of collective action rather than one dude with a gun (and a history of violence against women, same as it ever was). Anyway, a lot more people didn’t get shot because Scalise is a high-ranking Republican and so already had local cops with him, including Crystal Griner, a married black lesbian tasked with defending someone who not only hates her twice over but actively legislates against her.
- (Listen to a Republican, of course, and the answer is always more guns.)
- In contrast, sometimes people manage to air grievances against public officials while also improving the local environment. Hurray for revenge trees.
- The battle bots have discovered sumo.
- This Week in Disturbing Patents: Amazon seems to be developing methods to limit comparison shopping, in the middle of buying Whole Foods and opening brick-and-mortar bookstores again. Basically, browser requests for competitors’ sites would be limited or redirected back to Amazon on the in-store wifi; there’s not much they can do about the mobile networks…at least before all vestiges of net neutrality are eradicated and they can just buy off the mobile providers.
- Also in internet infrastructure, cable lobbyists are trying to get the FCC to prevent states from investigating false or misleading broadband advertising.
- Y’know, were I a Canadian Skateboarding Teen with Tiny Sunglasses, I too would be stoked.
- Who among us hasn’t been on one side or another of a Facebook unfriending trial?
- This Week in User Interfaces: It’s hard to tell which is more horrifying, the worst volume sliders in the world or the worst phone number entry fields in the world.
- In history, individual people have made a difference. Arkansas is Arkansas and not Arkansaw, it seems, because William Woodruff wanted it that way and made it that way in his newspaper.
- A lot of sea mammals are more intelligent than they get credit for. Orcas, for example, can recognize the steel behemoths that steal their food and take it back.
- This Week in Cute Animals: A friendly golden doggo followed the Google van around a Korean town, acting as unofficial ambassador to the world. What a good dog.
